Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: Impeachment

Over the course of Obama’s Presidency, there have been occasional rumblings to impeach him. These rumblings got a little attention a few weeks ago when Sarah Palin — who has no official position with the GOP — called for Obama to be impeached. But for the most part, the idea is being ignored. Conservatives are well aware that Democrats control enough of the Senate to block anything and that an impeachment fight would do little to benefit the country or them (even assuming appropriate “high crimes and misdemeanors” could be identified to fit the bill). You can peruse Hot Air, NRO, The Daily Caller, Town Hall … you’ll find little apart from shrugging. Conservative just aren’t that obsessed with the idea.

Consider, for example, the Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words database, which tracks words spoken in the House and Senate. So far in July, there have been 10 mentions of the term “impeachment” in Congress and four others of the term “impeach.” Eleven of the 14 mentions have been made by Democratic rather than Republican members of Congress, however.

Impeachment chatter has also become common on cable news. On Fox News this month, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, called for Obama’s impeachment, for instance. But for every mention of impeachment on Fox News in July, there have been five on liberal-leaning MSNBC.

In July, Fox News mentioned impeachment 95 times, or about three times a day. MSNBC mentioned it 448 times. And the trend was only going up at the end of the month.

Now why is this becoming such a big thing among liberals? Well, need you ask:

The Democrats’ congressional campaign arm pulled in $2.1 million in online donations over the weekend — the best four-day haul of the current election cycle — largely propelled by fundraising pitches tied to speculation that House Republicans could pursue the impeachment of President Obama.

Democrats have consistently used impeachment — a prospect that has been floated by several prominent conservatives but has not been embraced by most of the Republican establishment — to fill their campaign coffers, and their polling has shown that fear of an impeachment attempt as well as the House GOP’s efforts to sue Obama have the potential to drive midterm voter turnout on the left.

Ding! Or maybe I should say “Ka-ching!”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, of course. For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have run on the platform that the evil Republicans are going to take away social security, gut Medicare, start World War III, send your job to Mexico, destroy the environment, impeach Obama and cancel Arrested Development. Fear is what they do; security is what they offer. And both are lies.

Now the Democrats and their defenders will point out that it was Republicans who first raised this idea. And that’s true. But the GOP leadership and most conservative pundits almost immediately dismissed it. The Democrats will also point out that the GOP made a potential impeachment of Bush an issue in 2006. That’s also true. But as Silver points out, the disparity in concern over the issue wasn’t nearly as dramatic (374 mentions for Fox against 206 for MSNBC over the first seven months of the year). Nor did it reach fever pitch this call has. Moreover, the Democrats actually introduced articles of impeachment against Bush in 2008, something I don’t see the Republicans doing any time soon.

It tells you how thin the veneer of confidence is among Democrats that the mere whisper of impeachment from a Fox News pundit can send them into this kind of tizzy. It’s going to be very ugly when they lose power.

Over at Sullivan’s blog, they are asking when the moment was that we realized we were a decadent Imperial Rome. Most of them are saying the Impeachment, which is insane. Rome did not decline because its people stopped tolerating lying, perjury, obstruction of justice and its leaders assuming they were above the law. Moreover, their points strike a stunning note of historical ignorance. Presidents have been mocked, jeered and pilloried far worse than Clinton ever was. Check out Cracked on this one — yes, a fucking humor website is more historically up-to-date than the typical Democrat.

It’s true that things got very badly partisan after the impeachment and we have two parties that have, apparently, no interest in governing. But that’s been a long time in coming. And I would say the 2000 election played as great a role, if not greater. It’s easy to forget — after all, it was almost a decade ago — that the Democrats spent several years as the party of obstruction and bullshit.

If you want to mark a beginning of an Imperial era, you might go to Woodrow Wilson’s loathsome presidency or maybe FDR. Blaming impeachment is simply blaming Republicans. And it’s not Republicans who have gone more than two years without proposing a budget. It’s not Republicans who stuck their head in the sand on Social Security. It’s not Republicans who are already undermining the cost controls in Obamacare.

As for comparisons to Rome, I have read Gibbon. And my opinion is that the reason Rome fell is because its leaders and its people stopped defending it. Considering that we’re currently in three wars, I don’t think that’s our problem just yet.